Eulene’s lover wakes with a start. Something missing: woman, money, watch, gun. His life deciduous as October at the business end of a pawn ticket. He’s always been embarrassed by cross hairs and calibers and the biggest hits by the Sex Pistols. “Step on Your Watch” the last song before the radio signed off. His…
"Is this Lorraine Hennesey?" the woman wants to know as I lift the phone up to the bed. It's 3 A.M. Hennesey? Hennesey is the name I acquired in my second marriage-still a little strange even after two years. Especially in the middle of the night. "Yes?" "Who is it, Lore?" Sam asks from behind…
Tonight, my students can ask me anything. I'll tell them the story of my life, whatever they want. Outside, traffic shimmers in the gulf haze, mosquitoes incubate in the bayou. My students laugh softly at the broad a of my accent, evidence— if they need it—of my vulnerability, a woman fallible enough to be their…
The reservoir was low. Waiting in the bushes for Jack Noble's car, I searched the water's skin for the steeple of the church that lay drowned beneath. My father had explained how the village of Neversink had stood here until the late 1940s, when the river was dammed and the valley became a giant cup…
Not the one he's wearing in that stopped length of ground, but the one we saw together in the little shop in Oregon—moss agate so green it was nearly black on its silver band. Hard to come across it after, emptied of his hand and watchful. Thinking to surprise its power with treason, I gave…
In the film Baby It's You Rosanna Arquette dances girlish and vampy in front of her mirror. The brass fish on top of the TV curves upward toward some metaphysical sky! It's only yearning. It's only more yearning. Rosanna Arquette . . . Jimi Hendrix says there's a red house over yonder and the guitar…
Her car isn't turning over and she wishes She had a new one. Once she had a boyfriend Who wore a silly cap when he fixed things— Sometimes with parts left over—but they didn't Like each other's friends so now he's gone. She wishes things didn't end the way they do. She wonders if it's…
He's nervy, speaking through my voice while enjoying both sunshine and shade on the same safe street. Is he hiding behind that laughing tree? No. He could be farther away. A stranger approaches me on the street with a rose, let's say, or a message from someone back home. I'll accept the message or the…
On the plane coming back to Louisiana for my father’s funeral, I remembered a story he used to tell when I was a child. It was this: A little girl is crossing over a bridge. There’s a troll under the bridge who doesn’t like little girls; any that cross over, he eats them up. But…
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